Trump Proposes State-Run TV Network to Show the World How Great He Is

Something you may have picked up on over the past two years is that Donald Trump is not a huge fan of the media, or how it has covered his presidency. That probably has to do with the fact that his time in the Oval Office has consisted of a 12-car pileup of corruption, greed, incompetence, spelling errors, hubris, lies, entitlement, and variousuncategorizablebullshit. If you were responsible for the daily [insert catastrophic/mortifying/what-the-absolute-fuck incident here], you wouldn’t want to see it accurately covered, either! One way to deal with that would be for the president to simply ignore the coverage he doesn’t like and restrict his media consumption to the warm embrace of The Sean Hannity Show or Fox & Friends, where the hosts’ sole mandate is to bark and clap approvingly for anything Trump does. He has indeed done this to some extent, to the point that, as my colleague Gabriel Shermanreported in January, Trump habitually calls hosts to give them feedback on their segments. “What he usually does is he’ll call after a show and say, ‘I really enjoyed that,’” a former anchor told him. “The highest compliment is, ‘I really learned something.’ Then you know he got a new policy idea.”

Unfortunately, there is still the issue of other people watching non-Fox programming, and getting the (entirely accurate) impression that Trump’s administration is a disaster of epic proportions. At present, it appears someone in the White House has convinced the president that he can’t “challenge” TV networks’ “licenses,” as he has threatened to do at least twice, or to simply shut down all media outlets he doesn’t like via executive order. So he’s had to come up with a Plan C:

As it happens, the federal government funds something called Voice of America, a news operation with an annual budget of $218.5 million that broadcasts to 236.6 million people worldwide and plays “a role in shaping impressions of the United States and its leaders in foreign countries,” having exclusively served foreign audiences until 2013, when it became available domestically. It’s not clear if Trump is unaware of this organization, or if he chose to write it off as an ineffective vehicle to disseminate propaganda about his work in Washington after VOA’s director Amanda Bennett insisted in January 2017 that her team would “absolutely” not be “manipulated by the Trump administration.” Clearly, though, the Supreme Leader of the United States is looking for something a little closer to the Russian or North Korean model of news-making.